Change is all around us. It always has been and it always will be. As a Project Manager you have to make sure your project team satisfies a defined business goal. Change within a project and its surroundings is a given. The PM should not question change, he should not resist change and he should not blame everything that doesn't go to plan on change. When change is all around us, this means within the project, the surroundings and also the Project Manager self. Change is not a separate entity. It's part of nature. And so are we.

There are two different ways to cope with change.

One way is to predict the future. To anticipate the precise impact of a change and prepare for exactly that event. But we are not that clever. We are hopeless inapt to get the whole cause-effect chain correct. For example, to reduce the amount of CO2 that causes the global warming, we need trees. Cutting trees in the Amazon is therefor not a good thing. However, old trees don't absorb CO2 anymore, so cutting them might be even beneficial. But cutting trees facilitates soil erosion, which makes it impossible for trees to grow anyway.

And now try to make a decision.

Another way to handle change is to have the ability to adapt to new circumstances. This is called resilience. Resilience is build within nature's structure. When snow falls onto a leave, it simply bends, and the snow falls off. For a Project Manager one of the most important moments is the start of the project. The preplanning phase in which the structure of the project is created, determines the resilience of the project. Getting the proper balance between strategy, organization and feedback is essential.

While the project is running we have to keep our senses focused on the path that the project is going. Is it still in line with the overall business goal and within the constraints? For this purpose we can use all our traditional Project Management metrics like budget and schedule, we should pay close attention to the behavior of our team, but we should also sharpen our own mental abilities. Concentrate and sense the flow of the project.

If it seems that the structural resilience we put into the project is not sufficient, the PM can apply minor interventions. While the project is running on full speed, no large structural alterations can be made without severe disruption of the system. But small alterations are possible. Think in this respect about acupuncture. Acupuncture assumes the free flow of energy through the body. If barriers emerge, needles are put into place to remove the blockades. View your project as a group of people that interact along certain paths; the power, task and information structure. Interventions should be viewed as the removal of a blockade along one of those paths.